'instal 7
sat may 19
well got back to salerno ok ... pretty quiet since the departure of the cyprus pair....our australian friend "easy rider" is a man of few words and spent much of the few days keeping to himself in his cabin...we get to salerno about 7.00pm at night sat 19th....is 9.15pm when get off ship...we farewell easy rider at the dock gates and he rides his kaw. 650 off into the sunset....he has done africa and s america so we are sure he wont get lost....is a good night so kate and i saunter into town...is only about 40 min walk to center....man it is heaving in downtown salerno (as against last time which was a week night )....being sat night and every second building seems to be a restaurant....the italians love to dine out...we are walking down a crowded footpath looking for an internet cafe when this maniac on a motor bike flies out of the run of traffic and onto footpath not a million miles off being on my toe.....the chances of it being easy rider would be a mill. to one .....but it was...he was looking for somewhere to stay night...hadnt seen us in particular just thought that was good place to pull off)..i think "the big guy" must have misread my request for good luck that i stuck in the wailing wall at jerusalem !!
....well couldnt see anything resembling an internet cafe so with a bit of skillful navigation up the warren of backstreets we found ourselves at the same bar as the first night with jr (it was very busy)and i thought we could ask him for directions to an internet cafe.....he gave me a piece of paper with a brand of english gin written on it....i said no i would prefer a dark rum if we were having a drink thanks no gin.......he say "that password wifi"....well bugger me if i thought of asking him that first time around i could have done it then as i also had netbook with us then.....and it was free but we did have quite a few swings on the gate in the hour and a half we were doing the emails and copying all that drivel i had written on the voyage , to the blog......interestingly they dont have nip pourers in that part of the world they just pour it by eye....about half a glass at a time!!..jusr as well we werent driving!!..so he was a real good scout that guy and his barmaid...he wished us a long and happy life when we left....maybe he thought we havnt yet made a start at that!!!..it seems to be a very safe town to wander about in as is well lit , heaps of people and didnt see a lot of what you could term "bogans"......the irony came the next day when i was telling jessie about hunting for internet sites....he laughed and said why didnt i use the free wifi available in salerneo port.....bugger me again....never thought to check that...would have saved lugging net book etc around all night(namesake you should put that into your next updated notes...free wifi salerno at docks...esbjerg in towncenter portbury seamans center)
.....not sure where the salerno landings were in ww11 as museums shut but can just about guarantee it wasnt in the town as it is perched on mountainsides/cliff faces.....man it is a mountainous country and i can see why we have had the italians do most of our tunnel work in nz as modern motorways in italy are viaduct....tunnel....viaduct/tunnel etc etc ...some of the mountains must be like swiss cheeses....
quite a few of the crew signed off in salerno including good old woody......new captain seems a very affable guy in i guess late 50s which would make him at least 20 years older than most of his officers......he has a very big moustache and i guess i would nickname him "jimmy edwards" but i doubt there are many of you out there alive who will remember that english comedian so i've gone for a fairly obscure beatles song for inspiration...." i am the walrus"....he is the permanent master for this ship ie it is the only one he serves on as its' circuit suits him as he and his wife live in israel.
...(as an aside on woody which i forgot to add in last blog......the day before we got to israel ....it was all hands to the pumps sort of style to shift all the cars destined for israel and cyprus, down a few decks to be ready for unload as there were now spare decks closer to unload ramp....all the spare officers and crew were driving and woody was doing the pickup...they take this job fairly seriously and a lot of them wear flash driving gloves to prove it...they would all grab a car and scream off into the bowels of the ship and park up while woody who had picked a rh drive toyota would be hard up the last car....then they would all pile in on top of woody and he would ferry them back for the next run..it was a bit like those competitions they used to have years ago to see how many men they could get into a mini..jr and i would have loved a crack at that.....i said why didnt woody use the big european car......jr said it would probably breakdown if faced with such an onerous task.....you would be surprised how many cars they can shift like that.....and of course each deck is filled in the opposite order to which they come out....it is not like a city carpark....ie no lanes are left to select cars willy nilly)
...in salerno we topped up with fiat punta's and a lot of very nice looking alfa romeo guiliettes.....twin pipes and a front that looks very much like some of the old series jags.....6 on the floor.....they are rh drives so will be going to britain for sure
...another little aside while i remember and this bares out what janette(met her at the papatowai gutbuster in feb ,she is an editor with the "southland express" (its a community newspaper and if you all stick advts. in it she might shout for me ) told me prior to trip....she has lived in israel and she warned me to watch what i said at the border and here is an example.
...one of the officers that signed off at salerno , had only signed on at salerno on the way through and i heard on the grapevine that on his last run on this circuit which was about 3 years ago , he had stuck it up the israelies verbally and they still had his name on a blacklist and evidently the company now has to put him on a different ship that doesnt go to ashdod..never mind whether he was going to go off the ship or not.....so keep that in mind ...the israelies have long memories!!
sun may 20
woke up to find ship sailed in early hours ocast and goory all the way up upper west coast of italy today....visibility poor which means that we couldnt even see the island that the costa concordia hit littleown the ship itself which was a bugger...(..the costa company/italian govt want to get it into an italian port if they can so that they can use italian labour to cut it up )....also i was scratching to see another bit of that coast i wouldnt have minded a look at....a place called anzio which of course you will all know was another landing site in ww11
mon may 21
went on deck 6.0am to see we are in holding pattern just outside of savona harbour and about to take on pilot..it is raining cats, dogs.sheep and cattle...welcome to the italian riviera... .alongside and tied up just after breakfast.....berthed beside us are two cruise ships ...costa magica and costa romantica.....walrus says we can go into town for a wander till lunchtime as center is very close to port....we need some serious wet weather gear and jack sparrow comes to the rescue with a couple of company jackets and we head through surface flooding on docks into town....man it is still persisting down.....on good days italian hawkers sell roses....on wet days its umbrellas and the usual story is that once you get one of whatever they are flogging then the rest see it and leave you alone....so i used all my bartering skills to get kate a brolly for 3 euro and bugger me if the rain didnt magically stop so never even got to use it but i am sure we will in the near future....got a quick look around town....some nice old buildings painted up with murals....square in center of town has their war memorial which the nz division probably contributed to (although i think from memory that they were mostly shooting jerry in italy and only locals would have been what the yanks call "collateral damage")(another "forgot to tell you " is that the other night after we left cyprus i sat out on deck 9.30pm and watched the lights of crete slide past starboard side....get a copy of anthony beevors book "crete" and read about one of nz's greatest cock-ups of ww11)
anyway got what we needed in savona....nice place ..(.didnt remember it but back in 1973 martin, merv and i were camped up in the hills above genoa recuperating from the munich beer festival trip....we would have driven through savona along the riviera to france....and martin will recall running the red light in ventameglia the town on the border where we got chased on foot by what looked like the entire italian police force at the time and got a good fine !!)
anyway we chugged off along the riviera after lunch and could see a bit of sun hitting the beaches and managed to spy monaco in the haze with the binnoculars on the bridge although we were about 16 mile off shore by then..... we are now heading to villencia in spain....this was not on our original itinery but we must have a bit of time up our sleeves as we didnt' go to egypt....and there are some fords to be picked up in villencia but dont know how many or if we will get ashore because as per usual we will be arriving in middle of night and dont know how long for plus town is some way from port.....
tue 22nd may
....while i was up on bridge yesterday arvo spying monte carlo , mario , the other second mate drew my attention to a huge water spout dead ahead on the horizon and some very dark clouds surrounding it.....must have meant something as we had just finished our usual movie after tea when the sea decided to get up...the wind was hitting 5o knots and the old girl started to pitch and she heaved all night...neither of us felt crook at all but she rolled us around in our bunks all night like a washing machine....it actually rocks you to sleep straight away but then things start banging and wandering around so not the best nights sleep ever had..by breakfast time things had pretty much come right...this arvo we will be plodding through the balearic sea to villencia which is the sea between the spanish mainland and the islands of majorca etc...arrived about 11.00pm
wed 23 may
....well up bright and early crew have been hard at it loading but we can't go ashore until shipping agent comes on board as he dictates dept times....and in typical spanish fashion his idea of 7.00am turns out closer to lunch time and by that time it is too late as port so big , you need a cut lunch and a waterbag to get to the dock gates let alone the town... so to date that is only port we havnt got ashore in..sod it...absolutely cracker day so had to get deckies out and have serious book day...saw the worlds biggest container ship tugged out right past us at one stage....also tied up in front of us on same wharf was a gramaldi ship of similar design , the "repubblica del brasile"....and behind us the "grande detroit"...so all in all , there was almost a kilometer of wharf taken up by the three ships from the same company!!....sailed 3.0pm...didnt even have a movie night as stayed out on deck after dinner until about midnight....sunsets in the med on a good day are beaten only by those in northern western australia or at least from what we have seen anyway
....more on gramaldi.....there are 28 ships in the book we have that they own and there may be more....(they do ...the ones in the book are deep-sea ships, they also have a lot of interisland ferries etc etc )...they do the med, west africa and south america and take passengers on all these trips.....some of the extended whanau had presumed that my silence for the first 2 weeks of trip was because of ship sinking or pirates....but no such luck for you all.....there are a great many memos on noticeboard though which refer to procedures to combat pirates as they are now at it in west africa as well as the gulf of aden....copycat crime i think they call it...dont know what procedures are but the little buggers would have their work cut out getting on board these vessels though as so high....there are many service hatches at deck 3 level but they are all shut at sea and cant be opened from outside anyway.....they would have to have rope throwers to get a line up over handrail and if they did get aboard and into cargo areas , the crew could seal it off and give them a good dose of co2....would clean out the 4 legged rats at the same time so not a complete waste of the co2
thur 24 may
cracker day..last one in med..only 5 knots wind ....spanish coast a bit hazy 20 odd mile off starboard side....running towards gibralta....sea is full of ships of all shapes and sizes......memories of med by sea will be the bitching wind that always is blowing sometimes from all directions at once ! (just as well so many nooks and crannies around ship that you can always get a temperature that suits....off duty italians often lying about getting the filmstar tan ....can't be any holes in the ozone here....philies have built in tan so they can use off duty time on constructive things like movies...they must be low as we are giving them a copy of all our s as well as the 300hrs of tv shows which morry put on hard drive 10 series of "top gear" seems like it will be fairly popular given what we cart round all year) and always it is hazy......even wind and rain doesnt get rid of the bloody haze....something we dont have to worry so much about in good old temperate nz
...came up to gibralta 6.0pm....its not as dominating as you would think.....for those of you familiar with good old clinton....picture two popotunoa hills one joined to the other and that is about it.....the mountains back behind it in spain are much higher (some still have snow on them ) and across the straights in morroco are some much more serious hills as well.....kate wonders what they do for a living on gib.....i said "chase monkeys and annoy the crap out of spain"....which the latter they do....spain wants it back but the locals have the odd referendum and unanimously want to stay british....they like their wee red postboxes and their english bobbys !!
...tuned into the bbc for a news fix.....bugger me was like being in a time-warp as exactly the same news as when we sailed through here 2 weeks ago....the levison enquirey into rupert murdoch and whether israel will attack iran.....i was tempted to get my cel phone out and ring the bbc to tell them that a bit over a week ago , i asked a leading jew called eyal that very question and he dismissed the possibility out of hand .....george burns (if you remember who he was ) would probably have accepted that as well ...he once said...." the best candidates for president of the united states are too busy shining shoes and driving new york cabs, to take on the job "
....into the north atlantic which is all white caps and a fair swell making the old girl pitch a bit but at this stage is a very gentle rock you to sleep pitch....(hope so as clocks back an hr to gmt so xtra hr in bed)...we dont roll much as we have automatic anti-heeling equipment ie stabililizers .....today was day 21